1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to the field of service centers, and in particular to multi-tiered service centers. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a method and system for routing service calls to an appropriate tier level in a service center.
2. Description of the Related Art
Enterprises may be generally defined as organizations that provide products, which include goods and/or services. Enterprises include private and public businesses as well as governmental and educational entities. The product may be a physical device such as a computer, a service such as information processing, a training program, a public utility, etc. When an enterprise delivers a product, or when a potential customer for the product has questions about the product, technical assistance is often needed by the customer/user. For example, a prospective student may have questions about a particular course. A computer buyer may have questions about configuring his new computer to access the Internet. A company may have questions about technical specifications of a contract that has been let or is open for bids. An Information Technology (IT) customer may have questions about accessing/manipulating a database. Such examples are not intended to be exhaustive, but rather to illustrate the wide diversity of questions that may be received by an enterprise.
To handle such inquiries for assistance, enterprises may set up an internal service center. Moreover, for a variety of reasons, enterprises often choose to outsource, to a third-party service center, the handling of, or at least the routing of, requests for assistance. Depending on the nature of the request for assistance (“service request”), the third-party service center may, for example, 1) handle the service request, 2) forward the service request to the primary enterprise that sold/offers the product, or 3) forward the service request to another third-party service center. Determining how and where to route such service request calls can be difficult, slow, and expensive.